Why Facebook’s Most Recent News Feed Update is a Good Thing for Businesses

In the past, we’ve talked quite a bit about Facebook’s frequent new feed changes that have left users and page owners (read: businesses) wondering if they will ever catch a break with the social media giant.

According to Mashable, the new update will allow brands to gain more exposure on Facebook by simply tagging other pages and possibly gaining access to their fans’ news feeds on top of the fans they already have.

To elaborate further, if Facebook sees a high number of users being shared between two pages–for example, a sports news site page and basketball player’s page–then Facebook will suggest these pages to people who only like one of these pages, giving them the opportunity to perhaps like them separately and therefore give a brand’s page more exposure/fans.

This kind of outreach and exposure can do a lot to change the way businesses use their Facebook pages. Aside from potentially reaching out to an extra thousand-plus users–say, if you happen to tag a brand like Coca-cola or Google–it also gives brands an opportunity to do a little networking by recognizing other brands for their hard work and creative efforts, an essential component of brand awareness, which we mentioned in our post on thought leadership.

While this kind of networking may not work by tagging the bigger companies around the globe, it certainly does make a big impact if you do it on a smaller or local scale—something we recommend to smaller businesses looking to find like-minded people to work with.

Seeing as this update was just released a few days ago, we can’t say much for its success. However, Facebook seems to be pretty confident that the update will be well-received among users, citing recent surveys they took amongst users during the update’s testing period.

Our hope is that this update will go off without a hitch, though we always like to remind businesses to keep an eye out for any changes that might mess up their recruiting/brand material, keeping them safe from any setbacks that might occur.

What do you think about this new update? Are you relieved to see that Facebook is working in more business-friendly changes? Let us know your thoughts by connecting with us on Facebook or Twitter. We’d love to hear from you!